Cell-Throughput Analysis of the Proportional Fair Scheduler in the Single-Cell Environment

The fairness concept has been widely studied in the area of data networks. The most well-known fairness criterion (max–min fairness) gives priority to the minimum-rate session. Kelly questioned its appropriateness in his works on the bandwidth sharing among the end-to-end flows and proposed another fairness criterion preferring short-distance flows to enhance the overall throughput, which is called the proportional fairness (PF). A simple scheduler achieving this objective was introduced in wireless access networks and revealed that it can achieve a good compromise between cell throughput and user fairness. Although it has received much attention for some time, research on its performance mainly depended on computer simulations. In this paper, we analyze the PF scheduler to obtain the cell throughput, which is a primary-performance metric, and extend the result to analyze the capacity of multiple-input–multiple-output systems. We evaluate the effect of various parameters on the throughput of the PF scheduler through the numerical analysis.